


Another year

by Mary_from_Maryland



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 15:13:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mary_from_Maryland/pseuds/Mary_from_Maryland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John stands up to meet Sherlock’s gaze, and then, blinking in the golden afternoon light that is streaming through the open windows, he understands.</p><p> A year to change their lives, and another one is coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another year

It's winter and the dull metallic sky is melting with the dusty window John is blankly staring through.

He's standing alone in a neon-lit corridor, trying to ignore the pungent smell emanating from the damp walls. Water's dripping. Is it raining?

“Dr. Watson?”

John clears his throat and walks past the cold window, past the brightly coloured vending machine, past Sally Donovan, who bites her lip and averts her eyes - probably unable to feign sympathy. Even now.

The dark circles under Lestrade’s eyes look worse than ever, and John catches a whiff of night sweat and cheap coffee when the DI reaches over to shake his hand.

“Where is he?” he hears himself ask.  

“One of the upstairs classrooms. This way.”

“What - What have they -”

Greg glances back at him, panting while he climbs the stairs two steps at a time. “He's not phisically hurt,” he begins, then stops.

The room is dark and silent; a pile of old battered school desks is casting a long shadow over the floor. John walks round it, his head throbbing, his throat tingling unpleasantly as he inhales chalkdust and mold.

Sherlock is sitting with his back against the wall, hugging his knees, staring at the floor. John approaches him cautiously, clears his throat again, takes Sherlock's hand.

“Let’s go home.”

 

#

 

He thanks the officer and gets off the police car, tugging at his collar against the evening chill. Greg pats his back with a weak smile, pauses for a moment and leaves. Everyone seems to be avoiding Sherlock's eyes, which are wandering from face to face, helplessly blank. John walks to the doorstep. Sherlock is still clutching his hand.

Mrs. Hudson's eyes widen in relief when they meet her on the landing, but John raises his free hand to forestall her. Not tonight.

After sitting him down on the couch, John takes Sherlock’s shirt off and swallows involuntarily, blushing immediately after. _Damn it_ , he thinks to himself, but Sherlock takes no notice. Judging from his skin, he hasn't been drinking enough for days. John checks his breathing, cheks his pulse, straightens up. 

_What have they done to you?_

He awkwardly pats Sherlock's knee and walks to the kitchen, making more noise than needed with the stove and the kettle. He leaves the water to boil and goes back to the couch. Sherlock is shivering slightly and John feels immediately guilty. "I'll be right back," he mutters, walking round him towards Sherlock's bedroom. He tries to make his way past a pile of nondescript cardboard boxes he hasn't had the heart to move in the past few days, opens Sherlock's wardrobe, gives up and rushes upstairs to get one of his own shirts and a sweater. When he's back, Sherlock has drawn his knees to his chest again. John wishes he'd just look him in the eye. He gently lifts his arms, and then stops dead.

He hisses under his breath.

Two months before, Sherlock has been engaged in a particularly unsettling case. The body of a twenty-right-year old lawyer, Jessica Flyer, has been found  at the thirty-seventh floor of an office block in the heart of the City. Before starving to death, she'd scratched horrible drawings on the walls of the room, and she'd carved similar markings on her own skin with a rusty nail. In the end, thanks to Sherlock’s intuition and to some incorrect features in an old map of the London sewerage system, the case had been solved, and the culprit – a Mr. Warren Moss – imprisoned. John remembers his deep distaste upon learning what the murderer’s method had been: he had administered his victim increasing doses of DMT by a jugular vein injection, and then left her to her nightmares. After that discovery, what had initially been mistaken for other marks of induced self-harm on Jessica’s neck were found to be the signs left by the injections.

Little red scratches, almost identical to those which John is looking at on the side of Sherlock’s neck.

He takes a deep breath, helps his friend put the sweater on, salvages the boiling water and pushes a mug of tea between Sherlock's hands with a soothing but firm gesture. Sherlock drinks avidly, confirming John’s suspicion about him being dehydrated. John puts the mug aside, restrains himself from giving Sherlock another one, sits beside him on the couch and pulls a blanket over his shoulders.

Sherlock is shuddering. Swallowing tears back – why didn't anyone tell him? Didn't he have a right to know? –, John puts an arm around his shoulders.   

"I'm here, Sherlock. I’m here.”

 

#

 

After a quick dinner – he has’t felt hungry at all, but he vainly hoped that his eating something would convince Sherlock to do the same –, John leaves him some privacy and then walks to his room to say goodnight. He thinks he understands Lestrade, Donovan and Anderson's discomfort on the way back home. Sherlock Holmes - the cranky, haughty, unsufferably brilliant Sherlock Holmes - is now just - well, he's just plain weak. For a moment, John feels some kind of inexplicably sweet pain at the sight of his lean body through the sheets. After a while, he sighs, "Well, goodnight. I’ll be next door if you need me," and turns towards the door.

“John –”

“I know, I know, you’re fine," John replies abruptly. "There’s no reason why you should need me. No reason at all.”

“John, can you stay?”

 

#

 

It's spring and life is bearable again.

John feels like he himself needs recovering. He seldom thinks about those two weeks – about Mrs. Hudson’s hushed crying in the night, about Greg’s disheartening visits, about the pitiful attitude of the journalists –, but sometimes the thought does occur to him. He guesses it'll take some time.

Sherlock is getting better too. Although he hardly ever brings up the matter of his imprisonment, he’s become his surly and proud self again, which is, to John’s eyes, a sure sign of recovery. On some occasions, however, when John gets home with the grocery shopping or when he takes Sherlock’s mobile phone out of his pocket for him, a fleeting smile will brighten Sherlock’s features, and he'll meet John’s gaze with a twinkle in his eyes. This never fails to make John feel thrilled and pained at the same time, although he prefers not to wonder why.

As John ascertained in a brief conversation with Lestrade and Mycroft – who, for a change, has been somewhat shaken –, Sherlock has actually been administered DMT, although, thank God, in a smaller amount, and for a shorter period. The kidnapper eventually turned out to be Warren Moss’s son-in-law, a crooked man suffering from some kind of mental illness.

 

#

 

Despite Mycroft and Lestrade’s concerns, Sherlock has taken up his activity of consultant detective again, although for some time he's tended to avoid direct contact with criminals; he would rather give haughty instructions to the Yard detectives through texts, thus managing quite soon to cancel the pseudo-sympathetic look from Donovan’s face. Once in a while, he sends John to the crime scene in order to obtain an accurate description of the corpse before 'those lacking in imaginative intuition can meddle with it'. Mrs. Hudson has presently returned to her usual cheerful scolding, and the fridge has soon been packed with enough disgusting specimens to give her plenty of reasons for doing so.

Since the first night after the rescue, John and Sherlock are sharing a bed. It doesn’t seem to bother Sherlock, and it certainly doesn't bother John to be able to be with him at night, when – so he's been told – his friend is more likely to relapse into the state of panicking depersonalization caused by the drug.

Every evening, he'll wait in bed for Sherlock to complete one foul-smelling experiment or another. He's grown to appreciate the moment when his friend finally turns off the lights, plays a few last chords on his violin – apparently indifferent to the fact that he might wake up his flatmate, or maybe aware that John is still wide awake – and gets into bed with a brisk “Goodnight”. John will then turn towards the opposite side of the bed and get to sleep with a sigh of contentment, feeling an almost childish pleasure at the thought of Sherlock’s presence, of his regular breath, of his warm body besides him.

Sometimes, Sherlock cries out at night;  John will then reach out in half-sleep and smooth back his dark curly hair from his forehead, gently stroking it with his fingertips until he's quiet again. 

 

#

 

It's half past ten in the evening. After celebrating the solution of an intriguing case of robbery with a dinner out, John and Sherlock are being driven home by a particularly ill-tempered taxi driver.

They're sitting in a comfortable silence, watching the grey buildings go by, the occasional tree standing out against the clear evening sky.

Breathing out, Sherlock reaches over and gently brushes the back of John’s neck, curling his fingers into his hair, touching his spine. Blood rushes to John’s face and hands; his stomach twists, and he turns towards Sherlock with a trembling sigh.

Sherlock smiles to him, removes his hand, and looks away.

#

 

It's summer and the sun is hot and desperate like a song by David Bowie.

Since the night of the taxi, John has been dazed and wary. What the _heck_ has Sherlock meant with that? Why has he reacted that way? What is that feeling, that subtle, electrifying stream of light that pierces his body and mind every time Sherlock looks at him? John wonders and sleepwalks through his daily routine, grateful and unknowing.

 

#

 

How long have he and Jeanette been dating?, he wonders idly while getting off the underground train. A month or so, possibly. Is he in love with her? Of course he's not. This trenchant answer comes to him before he can prevent it. With a sigh, he walks along Charterhouse Street, where she's chosen an "intimate place" to “talk the matter over”.

Come to think of it, has he ever been in love with any of the women he's dated? He grudgingly admits to himself that he probably hasn’t. Of course, some of them have been great fun to spend time with, and he does recall developing some kind of affection for most of them, but there's never been anything unsettling, anything intense, anything remotely disturbing or fulfilling about them. Funny that he should realize that just now.

The 'matter' with Jeanette has been dragging itself since early June: at least now he remembers. The core of it is tediously simple: she wants him by her side, and he seldom is. Despite the small amount of effort John has put into keeping romance alive, she hasn’t given up – rather because of pride than because of love, he hopefully supposes – what remains of their relationship. Sherlock, whose indifference to personal privacy is remarkable, has been following with increasing amusement his flatmate’s half-hearted attempts to soothe Jeanette into letting go of him by stealing into his email account.

Anyway, John muses as he approached the restaurant, she didn't let go.

 

\-------------------------------

 

“How did it go with Jeanette?” Sherlock asks as soon as he enters the flat.

“Can’t you guess?” John smiles wryly. He knows the consultant detective enough by now to be sure that such a question can’t be serious.

Sherlock, however, looks merely annoyed. “Why should I?” he snaps.

“Well, _I_ don’t know. The position of the crumbs on my shirt. The way in which I raised my eyebrows. The colour of the mug I’ve chosen. You’re the deductive one. Can you possibly be baffled by so easy an object of observation as me?”

Sherlock stars at him with a thoughtful expression for a few seconds, then mutters, “Looks like I can”.

“What do you mean?”

Sherlock paces the room with a beaten look. “I’ve noticed something since my… Since January. I just can’t see through you anymore. At first, I feared there was something wrong with me after the – accident. But there's nothing wrong. I can still read people and solve cases and unmask villains”, he laughs bitterly, “but you’re a mystery to me. You are - I can't even -”

John stands up to meet Sherlock’s gaze, and then, blinking in the golden afternoon light that is streaming through the open windows, he understands.

“You can’t even guess I’m in love with you?”

Sherlock’s eyes widen. Stealthy sunbeams are  playing on his cheekbones and curly hair. John finds himself short of breath. 

“What… What did you just say?”

“I love you. You’re the air I breathe. I love you.”

 Sherlock walks slowly towards John, touches his eyes and kisses him.

 

#

 

It's autumn and life is a gift.

John is resting his head on Sherlock’s chest. Even now, he likes to look at him while he’s sleeping. He’s so harmless and luminous. His breath is deep and calm, and with every intake of air his arms, circled round John’s chest, are singing you’re precious, you’re warm, you’re here, you’re mine.

Love is happy and simple. Days find them kissing on the doorstep, grazing each other’s throat with their lips, watching crap telly, swallowing each other’s breath, drinking tea, solving cases. They have rows and keep sullen silences for days on end, they sleep on opposite sides of the bed, they argue and cry and live for each other.

Life is a gift, and another year is coming.


End file.
